It's Saturday evening and it has been a quiet week. On Thursday, it looked like the weather was going to turn cold. I scraped the mud more or less level in the barn yard and our gravel roads and pads. Sure enough it did turn cold and everything froze solid but fairly level. So at the moment we have no mud or snow to deal with. Rough ground is tough on the snow plow blade.

Thursday evening we took the governor from our old AC over to the mechanic. He was puzzled as to the cause and said he'd look into it and get back to us. It will be interesting to see what caused the problem.

Friday, a friend came by and we moved two trailer loads of soybean waste round bales over to Verne's to use as bedding.

Saturday, Jim and I got a lot done. We have a yard hydrant that intermittently freezes which causes a problem. The way it works is that when you shut it off, the water drains back below ground through a little hole in the valve. The valve is three feet deep and surrounded by gravel to let the water weep away. Last week, we blew compressed air back trough the stand pipe and we thought we had the problem solved. It was frozen again yesterday and we had to thaw it with a torch. Today we bought electric heat tape and insulated it and plugged it in. We'll see what happens tomorrow morning. We also blew a bunch of waste hay and bean waste onto the cattle mounds. They really like to burrow into it.

The new calf is doing well and the cow is an excellent mother. Calves really grow quickly and this one is quite lively. We plan on putting an ear tag on her tomorrow. We'll have to think of a name pretty soon.

It's 28 tonight but supposedly quite a bit colder with lots of lake snow tomorrow. We hope we have the hydrant problem under control.

The boys in the diner are discussing the automakers problems. Not much sympathy there. We also got in a conversation about some of the figures of speech that the old farmers used. We agreed that they were all based upon not taking chances and being careful. Apparently the bankers and automakers were not familiar with many of them.

My all time favorite which was directed at an errant plow horse is " Hold her, Knute, she's headed for the buckwheat."